Nature

…so I check the Bulletin and hope they’ll conveniently feature two embarrassing stories atop each other so I can take a screenshot and go about my day.

I hope this all makes us stop and take a moment to consider the precariousness of our frontier towns as they grapple with these coordinated attacks. Who will save this bustling city from nature’s uprising?

My guess: Denny Mogis.

And before noon I’ve posted something on this blog and made a joke about a former area car dealer. I think I’ve earned myself a cup of coffee.

Hobart is the journal I wish I did, but at least I can still read it. Their new issue, ‘The Great Outdoors,’ is now out and it’s a good one. You should not only pick up this issue, you should plant it in the ground when you’re done reading it. Then you should water it with a hose twice a day. Wonders will bloom.

I can’t say it enough: this journal is amazing from Buffalo to Zoophilia, and you need to read it.

I have three short shorts in it which are notable for being about Boy Scouts, Claire’s, and Angelina Jolie, respectively. I realize that, at best, only one of those things occurs naturally, but I worked in enough references to birds to make the others count (i.e. Find-and-Replace ‘Earrings’ with ‘Toucan’).

You should also check out the web extras that go up here, especially more of Lucy Corin’s apocalypses. There’s a lot of other great stuff up there, too, including one of those pie crust recipes that involves ice water. I never trust those recipes, but I do trust Hobart.

So today, someone at work forwarded me an email from a client of ours in Alaska who had attached some photos we might use. In the first photo, a handsome man in camouflage is holding what I guess is a rainbow trout. This photo seems nice. In the second, third, and fourth photos, a bear is seen climbing into a boat, sitting in the boat, and destroying the boat, respectively. It’s some kind of brown bear, possibly the Brown Bear (Ursus arctos), and it doesn’t seem happy about this boat.

In the accompanying email, we learn that the man is the husband of the woman who sent the original emal, and that he and his buddies were fishing–went well, caught a lot–and that they saw this boat (not theirs) get destroyed by a bear who ate the seats of the boat before jumping off of it back into the water and swimming away. They left before whoever owned that boat came back to it (maybe it was the bear’s cheating husband, who knows), but it’s fun to imagine what their reaction might have been.

That this came the day that I was going to write about Alaskaphrenia couldn’t be more perfect (and never mind when I said I was going to write about it).

Hume’s poems here are full of the eccentricities of America’s last near-frontier, and as a book, this collection is somehow even more inherently Alaskan than its straightforward title suggests, if that’s possible. It’s a lush book, and my favorite poems here were ones where nature, like the bear in the boat, seemed to be coming through the door. In “What’d You Come to Alaska for If You Don’t Want? Hume writes:

The dark amplifies my hearing

You too hear animals at the wrong time of day

Some Sounds are known to be true

Moans beg themselves into handfuls of lit trees

Shed leaves mortify the silence

Stridulations use strong burrowing instincts to get in

The poems here are nothing if not full of confrontations. Alaska vs. speaker, speaker vs. nature, Alaska vs. nature, etc. and it’s easy to read the book as building towards the poem “I Have Not Yet Told You What Alaska Means to Me” which ends:

I mistook myself

for the beloved

until I saw a way through the third eye

iron caribou came

attracted by flashbacks

from an ancient blood disease

I sucked their udders so hard

as if that would draw a word

Hume’s Alaska is a dangerous, contradictory one, and the poems struck me as starting in the interstices where the wild has stopped and humanity has sprung up between the ice, trees, and bears. It’s fascinating because the nature is the native and the poet is the frightened interloper (as opposed to nature being a delicate, under-siege thing which is how its often written). It’s an interesting shift from Hawkey, who, no less concerned with the physical world, wrote nature as if to ground his work, to make the book abstract in its writing but real in its subject matter. Hume, on the other hand, writes nature as an exaggerated thing, like background in a Sendak book and by doing so writes a book that, though intimately about nature, is really about wilderness. I suppose the most reductive way to say it would be to break down and say stupidly that it’s a book about wild, unknowable Alaska.

And while something about the looming figure of nature makes it a cold, dark book without room for politics or religion or romantic love, it still a heartbreaking book in the way sadness is loudest when alone. My favorite poems of the book feel like shivering in the dark. My number one, “Insert Your Eyes Here. Contemplate the Enchantments of Your View and Pleasurably Serve Your Mind,” has this line in the last stanza: